Remove [cross-fetch] dependency.

[sosoba]

🚀 Feature Proposal

Remove cross-fetch dependency.

Motivation

Nowadays Node 18 LTS has global fetch enabled by default. Deno has also always had global fetch.

The cross-fetch has a hard coded node-fetch subdepndency which are redundant luggage. If someone need to support old Node versions they can add ponyfil directly in our legacy project:

npm i node-fetch

if (!global.fetch) {
  global.fetch = require('node-fetch');
}

[adrai]

cross-fetch (node-fetch) is not used if global fetch is available... so there should be no problem with that?

[sosoba]

The problem is the hard dependence on node-fetch. Npm always install thist package even hardly anyone needs it anymore. This dependency should be optional.

[adrai]

And what's the problem if it's installed? It should not be bundled, right?

[adrai]

tldr;

• "hardly anyone needs it" => https://npmtrends.com/node-fetch
• fetch still experimental in v18 => https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v18.x/docs/api/globals.html#fetch
• not everyone is on v18 right now
• still like to support older node versions without ponyfill
• is not bundled, only installed
• there is no such thing like conditional npm install i.e. install only if node < 18
• if there's no real issue with that, I would like to keep it as is... it may be in future this will change

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[jonkoops]

@adrai now that the Fetch API has been marked as stable in Node.js 21, and this API is available unflagged in all actively supported LTS versions (v18, v20), would you reconsider removing this dependency?

[adrai]

I still don't see any disadvantage of keeping it. Only because node-fetch or cross-fetch is installed in your node_modules, does not mean it gets loaded by the runtime or the browser.

btw: v2.3.0 uses the new cross-fetch update: https://github.com/lquixada/cross-fetch/releases/tag/v4.0.0 that officially included node v18 and v20 support

[jonkoops]

I still don't see any disadvantage of keeping it. Only because node-fetch or cross-fetch is installed in your node_modules, does not mean it gets loaded by the runtime or the browser.

True, this would only remove the dependency from the package so that less code needs to be downloaded. I think that is still a valid thing to do, but perhaps should be part of a major version (if any will be made at some point).

btw: v2.3.0 uses the new cross-fetch update: https://github.com/lquixada/cross-fetch/releases/tag/v4.0.0 that officially included node v18 and v20 support

Interestingly it also drops support for Node.js 10 and 12 in that version. Are the supported Node.js versions for 18next-http-backend documented somewhere? I can see 16, 18 and 20 in the CI.

[adrai]

I can see 16, 18 and 20 in the CI.

Yes, those there are always tested, but also lower versions might work.

[jonkoops]

Just ran into this strange issue with cross-fetch and Vite due to it being a dependency of this package. It looks like with Vite 5 somehow both cross-fetch and node-fetch are included in production builds, which results in the following error:

Uncaught ReferenceError: global is not defined

It appears that cross-fetch depends on an older version of node-fetch, which attempts to access the global variable (that doesn't exist in browsers).

[adrai]

Can you please provide a reproducible example?

[jonkoops]

Sure, yeah working on that now.

[jonkoops]

Managed to reproduce this locally. Looks like this is due to some overrides we're setting in out Vite config, so I don't believe this is cause for concern.

[flipvh]

Hi @sosoba Sorry to bother you, but I came here looking to reduce my js bundle size a bit as I use this nice package in the browser. (Or should I not use this for frontend?) I noticed cross-fetch is quite a large dependency. Have you found a way to reduce bundle size yourself with this package or in another way? Thanks!!

[adrai]

ceoss-fetch is not loaded on runtime if native fetch implementation is available

[jacobbogers]

Hi, Can you expose the "fetch" as pluggable, this would help greatly at testing especially as we dont use jest mocks (it.concurrent will be an issue since jest mocks are global to test file) hence the need to make it pluggable

Example:

config: { 
    getFetch: () => globalThis.fetch
}

for mocking (integration tests)

config: { 
    getFetch: () => fetchMocked
}